The US has fallen to grey in the Paris MoU list, while South Korea and Poland have moved up to white, after the Paris MoU approved its 2017 port state control inspection results.

The Paris MoU’s annual White, Grey and Black (WGB) list ranks flag states from best to worst, based on the total number of inspections and detentions over a three-year rolling period, for flags with at least 30 inspections in the period.

The new WGB list takes effect from July 1st 2018; it is a factor in calculating an individual Ship Risk Profile.

The Paris MoU consists of 27 participating maritime Administrations and covers the waters of the European coastal States and the North Atlantic basin from North America to Europe.

More than 18,000 individual inspections take place on board foreign ships in the Paris MoU ports. In the 2017 WGB list the Paris MoU included 73 flags – the same number as last year. Of these, 40 flags were on the White List, 20 on the Grey List and 13 on the Black List. Last year the numbers were 42, 19 and 12 respectively.

The top performer for 2017 was France, followed by the Cayman Islands, Netherlands, Denmark and the UK.

New to the Grey List for 2017 were Iran, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, and the US. Last year they were all on the White List.

From being a non-listed flag last year, Tuvalu is now on the Grey List. The only change to the Black List this year is the addition of the Ukraine. Republic of Congo-flagged vesssels came in last.

During an IMO workshop in October last year the world’s Port State Control regimes agreed to consider moving away from black/grey/white lists and towards expanding an individual ship risk profile approach (read more here).

Meanwhile, the Cook Islands flag, operated by ship registry Maritime Cook Islands (MCI), said that it had shown a positive flag state performance, as reported in the latest report on Port State Control in the Asia Pacific Region by Tokyo MoU. Cook Islands reported a decrease in the number of inspections with deficiencies; from 27 in 2016 to 20 in 2017. The number of deficiencies fell from 181 in 2016 to 116 in 2017.

The flag’s three-year excess factor fell from 0.87 in 2016 to 0.60 in 2017.

MCI CEO Glenn Armstrong said today that the ship registry’s newly-enhanced technical department, through more rigorous flag state inspection regime, looked towards bringing down the number of inspections with deficiencies further. He added that the progress made by MCI for the past year was encouraging and the ship registry was hopeful about getting on the Tokyo MOU White List.

 

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